


Vulpix

by Potboy



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Pre-Slash, mention of animal cruelty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 13:43:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20507963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy
Summary: Inspired by this post on Tumblr https://galadhir.tumblr.com/post/187470239865/one-more-headcanonsunangelflowers:"So I have this mental image of Ren going to Hux’s office after their working cycle and finding the General working without his gloves, with the collar of his uniform tunic undone and wearing glasses."But derailed by my love for fox Hux and my continual annoyance at Snoke's idea of how to train an abused puppy.





	Vulpix

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [One more headcanon](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/516275) by Sunangelflowers. 

After the salt-white glare of Crait, the merciless light, the bleeding footprints, the terror and loss and silence. The silence in his head. The final desperation to have them both gone. To be free, even if it meant death, death for the First Order. Death for the whole galaxy….

Kylo shook his head, bumping his shoulder on the corridor wall as his knees unstrung themselves beneath him. Force! He was tired. He was so tired.

After all that light and rage and loss, it was comforting to be back in the polished dark of the Finalizer. Here, when his vision swam, when he kept reaching out and reaching out to the places in his head that were monstrously empty, when he kept catching himself, with a vertiginous jolt, on the lip of falling into that endless emptiness where his master’s guidance had once been…

Here it just felt like he was struggling not to fall asleep. The dark was like the dark behind his eyelids.

One more task and that struggle too would be over. He could sleep, and awake into a future without masters. No one to disappoint. No lightning to rain down on his head ever again. No raised saber in the night, and everything it meant.

Anguish struggled to raise itself out of the tar-pit of his heart, as he pushed away the thoughts of his family he had accidentally triggered. His mother’s arms. His father’s crooked smile. Luke’s pride, his hope. He had loved them. They had tried to kill him. Could there be a greater pain than this?

Yet he was so tired even this ultimate wound could raise no snarl. He rubbed his stinging eyes with his knuckles, and stepped within the sensor range of the door to Hux’s office. Just this one last thing and he could rest.

The door opened before him. He took two steps, and it closed behind him, shutting out the streamlined minds of the bridge crew. They had not been watching him, but their avoidance had been loud.

In here it was quiet. The lights were low. There was only the arching scatter of radiance from a holographic star map reflected from the dark mirror of the walls like a flotilla of comets. And a light by Hux’s datapad, filtering through a glass of liquor by his left hand. A warm, amber spot like a sun captured on his command.

And that was appropriate enough.

The thought surprised Kylo. He waited for the seethe of resentment and jealousy, of contempt and hatred he kept for Hux to sear its way up into his mouth like the taste of salt and blood. But it didn’t come.

Truly this didn’t look like Hux. Collar open, jacket askew and spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose, this young man could have been a research student at Coruscant university, poring over blueprints late into the night.

The bared throat was purpled with bruises, swollen a little – his collar must have chafed it.

How else would you keep a rabid cur, Kylo thought, involuntarily, if not on a choke chain?

But that… that was Snoke’s voice as he hadn’t heard it for hours. Coming out of the deep places in him almost as if the man was still there.

Kylo shook himself, snorting the thought out like a foul breath. Just an echo. That’s all it was. An echo.

At the sound, Hux startled, head coming up. Eyes bright as a welding torch fixed on Kylo’s as the general scrambled to his feet, his hand coming up to close the ends of his collar, either in modesty or a vain attempt to protect his neck.

“Supreme Leader, my apologies. I didn’t hear the door.”

Bruises like spilled wine across his cheek and chin, his bottom lip swollen and scarlet. Bruises in the way he held himself, very tight as if not to tremble, and yet there was a faint never-ending shake just to the tips of that disordered red hair. Here in the dim and gold light it looked soft as fox-fur.

The expression in Hux’s eyes now was wary, calculating. A little wild, like that of the injured red vulpix young Ben had once found on the side of the road and tried to bring home. It had bitten Ben’s hand when he tried to soothe it, and the shock of the teeth snapping together in his flesh had been something of an inside joke between him and Snoke whenever Hux spoke.

“Don’t...” Kylo said, raising a hand to ward off… something. Hux’s insincere obsequiousness, perhaps, or his attempt to button his collar.

It was late at night. The man had bags under his eyes the same colour as his injuries. The sense of his mind, normally a quicksilver, cruel thing with a dry wit and an ocean of darkness beneath it even more bitter than Kylo’s, was slurred and sleepy. Almost at peace.

“At ease, I mean,” he began again, feeling emotions, memories, sloughing away from him in a long slow withdrawing like that of a tide. It would gather the wrack down deep in the wells of the Force and the places of his unconscious being and would return with insight.

“Both parts of the Supremacy are now airtight. The injured have been onboarded throughout the rest of the fleet. Is there anything else?”

“High Command will have to be notified of the change of Leader,” Hux observed. “It may be to your advantage to make a speech.”

“You can do that,” Kylo said, imagining it. If he couldn’t have a panning shot sweeping up to himself and his Empress side by side, crowned in Force radiance, perhaps it would be just as good to have Hux, the beautiful and terrifying executioner of Hosnian Prime, Hux, eater of suns, place some kind of diadem on his head.

“Make me your mouthpiece and I will be harder to get rid of,” Hux observed, snapping his fingers and quenching all the holographic stars in the room. He picked his datapad up and held it to his chest like a shield. His exhaustion filled the room like a web of black silk.

“Perhaps I’m not intending to get rid of you.”

“Ha,” Hux laughed, “Finally agreeing with Snoke, are we, that I’m useful after all?”

His voice didn’t have its usual poison, but Kylo thought of that injured vulpix again. Snoke had reminded him often of the hot skewer of betrayal as it bit him, had brought back repeatedly the shame of what happened next.

Hopes and dreams crushed, rejected beyond bearing, Ben had lifted a nearby curbstone with his mind, smashed it into the vulpix repeatedly, screaming. His mother had dragged him away, shaking with anger herself, despair beneath the fury. She’d loved him, but she’d hated him sometimes too.

“Leave him alone, Ben! He didn’t mean it! You can’t blame him for being scared.”

She had taken the animal to the shelter, while Ben curled up in his room and wept. He had only wanted to take care of the creature. He had seen with deep yearning how comforting it would be to cuddle the breathing body to him, to take it home and fall asleep with his face in the soft fur, the thin, leaf-like edge of an ear pressed against his lips. Now it was all ruined.

Leia had been gentle again when she returned, deliberately so, stinking of regret and worry and self-reproach beneath it. “Sometimes if an animal has been hurt, they can lash out,” she’d said. The words returned to him now as the light to Snoke’s dark, naively kind. “It doesn’t mean they’re bad. It just means they need extra love, extra patience to gain their trust.” _And you aren’t the sort of person who can give that to them_.

Kylo bit the inside of his cheek, shaking off the memory. He had no masters now. Not Snoke, not Luke, not Leia and all the things she thought but didn’t dare say to him. He would learn from his mistakes, and theirs. He would make his own course.

“Useful. Yes,” he agreed. It was the barest of compliments, but Hux preened at it nevertheless, as though it was all he had ever aspired to be.

Hux straightened his shoulders and smiled his scalpel smile. “Well that’s something at least.”


End file.
